Lord! When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book, in a real book I mean. —CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Parnassus on Wheels

You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task—what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness—your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move...

Two of the manifestations of the new evil: insensitivity to human suffering, and the desire to colonize privacy by taking away a person’s secret, the something that should never be talked about and made public. The global use of others’ biographies, intimacies, lives and experiences is a symptom of insensitivity and meaninglessness.

It seems an unaccountable pleasure18 which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more they are delighted with the spectacle. … They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.

A simple illustration of this is pornography. Many people enjoy looking at attractive naked people, for mundane Darwinian reasons. But there aren’t always attractive naked people around when you need them. So we have created two-dimensional surrogates22 that simulate the experience, and hence inspire much the same reaction of lust that would be inspired by the real thing. You are not responding to the surrogate as an artwork, you are responding to the naked woman (or man, or couple, or threesome, etc.) that is represented. The pleasure of sham nudity isn’t limited to humans. In a recent study,...